Gold leaf circuit board

Ah, the glitter of gold… or fake gold, we’re not really sure. But [Mike Hogan] and [PJ Santoro] have been working with faux gold leaf as a conductor on circuit boards. The device you see above is mounted on metal-covered paper substrate and it really works.

They started by applying spray adhesive to heavy paper to make the gold-clad they needed. This was cut down into hexagons in homage to their hackerspace, Hive76 in Philadelphia. From there the shape of the microcontroller (an MSP430 G2211 in this case) to prevent shorts under the chip. The leads were flattened to interface well with the gold contacts, and a hobby knife was used to score the traces. Some careful soldering made up the final connections, and they were in business.

Oh, wait; chip on board but nothing on chip. They forgot to program it first! Since there’s no header they needed an easy way to interface with the board. The clever guys used the power of magnets to hold alligator clips in place. See how they did that in the demo video after the break.

They’re also working on some boards that use conductive ink similar to this hack but we haven’t seen a write-up from these two about those experiments… yet.

Once again I submit that any HAD writer should send their post to one or more other HAD writers before posting for a basic grammar check. You are not posting anything sooooo cutting edge that a half hour delay for editing would ruin your post. Rather it would end the ongoing embarrassment and “gammar nazi” posts (like this one) that sloppy writing style propagates. If you want to be taken seriously, act professionally.

Well, off the top of my head…
1) When you run out of copper-clad
2) Creating a circuit on a non-standard substrate, like cardboard or glass or tile
3) “Etching” a circuit on an arbitrary shape that’s not flat. For example, a neat custom holiday ornament from one of those craft-store plastic orbs, with gold-leaf circuit traces on the outside. Pretty, and functional.

May I suggest that you add to the article that you *soldered* the MCU to the foil? Without that, both the mention of conductive paint at the top, and the magnetic attachments, tend to lead one to think that soldering to the foil isn’t possible.

In my deformative youth, I found that ordinary pencil lead was conductive enough for high impedance circuits. I drew circuits on ordinary paper with a soft lead pencil, going over it several times to get the resistance low enough.

The first ones used neon lights in R-C relaxation oscillators. The resistors looked just like the schematic symbol for resistors. :-) The capacitors were a filled-in block on both sides of the paper (one side for each plate). Paper clips were used to attach wires, and as ‘feedthrus’.

Scotch magic tape made a better capacitor dielectric than paper (higher breakdown voltage). It is also piezoelectric; a neon oscillator made with such a capacitor makes an audible sound!

The coming of CMOS opened new possibilities. You can draw your circuit with pencil on paper, and punch the leads of a thru-hole DIP into it to make connections. Due to the nearly infinite impedance of CMOS inputs, it works! :-) Just don’t expect high speeds or high currents in those pencil traces. :-)